HELP SAVE DOLPHINS IN CALFORNIA WATERS

One Dolphin per Month for One Year, this is a new program I am starting to tell you about our project.....because I think the best way to tell you about it is to let the dolphins speak.......

Trino is a key dolphin to my story because she was the first one identified in my study. She was first seen on October 9, 1990 by my friend Tom Norris who is really the one person who got me involved in studying them. I only first saw her with my own eyes in August 1991, when I started going out to sea on my own. I named her Trino because of her three evenly spaced notches on her dorsal fin. It became clear that Trino was a female because she was consistently accompanied by her calf Newbie at that time. Newbie was already a few months old when we first saw Trino. We could tell from its size and the size of its dorsal fin compared to its mother’s. As a good calf should do, Newbie was always swimming close to Trino, almost touching her body. The mother-calf bond is one of the strongest bonds in bottlenose dolphin societies and lasts between four and six years. During this time the calf learns the basic skills necessary for survival as well as the identity and character of its mother’s preferred associates. It also gets to become acquainted with calves of similar age which will likely become later associates in life. Over time, calves swim progressively farther and farther from their mother either in the company of other calves or temporarily associating with other adult dolphins (especially other females). This is when it gets pretty confusing for us researchers to tell who the mother of a particular calf is. In the case of Trino and Newbie, their relationship was pretty clear and we continued to see them together for at least five years.

Trino has moved on to have more calves, but Newbie will always be special in my mind because it was the first one I got to know and observe. One surprising thing we learned about Trino is that she is at least 32 years old as of 2015. How do we know how old Trino is?

Well, we asked around….We collaborate with researchers along the California coast and each research group collects photographs of the same dolphins in different areas of the California coastline, San Diego, Orange County, Santa Monica Bay, Santa Barbara, Monterey Bay (us) and San Francisco Bay. In1988, Dr. RH Defran, now Professor Emeritus at San Diego State University, and his students photographed Trino in San Diego, as an adult. She looked exactly as she does now, with her slight but defined evenly spaced notches on the dorsal…. So we calculated her age based on what we know (2015-1988=27 years as an adult plus at least 5 years as a calf). I am 51 so these dolphins have been around at least since I was in high school!!! I matched Trino’s dorsal fin to the San Diego catalog as a Master student, as this was part of my thesis work. A lot has happened since then, but Trino has been in my life ever since.